Stirling works

If, as Deyan Sudjic seems to think, architecture is an art form (Review, last week), it is a practical one: without clients it does not exist. The Stirling Prize's job is to widen debate about architecture and hence improve the quality of buildings. To do so, it unashamedly uses television and the columns of newspapers.

The Stirling Prize is not just about 'architectural ideas', it is about buildings that work. But if the three most recent winners - Foster's Air Museum, Future Systems' Media Centre and Alsop's Peckham Library - do not provide 'a challenging vision of what architecture can be', please tell me what does.

The way the Stirling Prize operates has not changed since Sudjic himself presented it in Glasgow in 1999, nor indeed since its inception three years earlier: each short-listed building is visited by three different juries which include lay assessors as well as professional architects. The only thing that has changed is its profile.

Sudjic seems to be arguing for a virtual world where films never leave the cutting room, books remain in the minds of their authors and buildings stay forever on their electronic drawing boards.

The Royal Institute of British Architects believes in building a better world and the Stirling Prize is one small way of helping achieve it.